Bubulle's weblog

Tue, 09 Oct 2012

It's quite some time since I didn't report about Debian Installer
localization. Indeed, thanks to the tireless activity of Cyril
Brulebois, we focused on releasing D-I and I indeed stopped harassing
translators for updates around July 2012.

Why July? Well, you probably know we have "something" to release as
soon as we can and most, if not all, Debian energies should be focused
on this!

Or, more precisely speaking, I only focused on getting the newly
introduced material translated: we had several changes recently in
D-I, mostly focused on important features, such as IPv6 support
(thanks to Phil Kern who worked on this), better wireless networking
support (thanks to Sorina Sandu) and EFI boot support (thanks to Steve
McIntyre).

And, of course, when people change code in D-I, they want to add
questions to users, display error and informative messages, etc, etc.
And these need translations..:-)

Most translators coped with all this (sometimes with /me hitting them
hard on the head to get updates) and D-I beta2 was released with 37
complete translations out of 73 supported languages.

Yesterday, I just resumed the activity of trying to get more updates
not only for those recent changes, but also for other older
changes...or for languages that never got completed in the past.

As a result, we bumped from 37 compelte languages up to 45 this
morning: look for level 1
here (level 2 has been hit by a change in iso-codes, but that
change doesn't really affect D-I).

If you language is not 100% in the leftmost column on the stats page,
you can probably help. Just get in touch with me and we'll check if
somebody is already working on this or not.

(doh, I nearly had it. I just got #690019, #690020 and #690022 for
l10n stuff)

Bartek Krawczyk reported Debian bug
#690000 on Monday October 8th, against guake. And my friend
Sylvestre Ledru, the package maintainer, now has to fix it instead of
trying to promote the use of Scilab over proprietary alternatives in
the French aerospace research organizations..:-)

Bug #680000 was reported as of July 2nd: 3 months and 8 days
for 10,000 bugs. This is a VERY significant drop in the bug reporting
rate in Debian.

Last time, I wrote: "How will the wheezy freeze affect this? We'll see
in two months!". We have the answer: the wheezy freeze triggerred an
important drop in bug reporting rate in Debian. My general feeling is
somehow different: for whatever reason, I feel like the *overall*
activity in the project has dropped significantly. I seem to have less
mails to read, less bugs reported against my packages, even less
heated discussions here and there, as well as several very quiet
channels on IRC.

Am I pessimistic when feeling that the overall momentum is sliding out
of Debian? Maybe I am, so, folks, please make me optimistic and move
you fingers out of the place where they are and help releasing that
damn penguin.

Apart from that, our next milestone (apart from the wheezy release!) will be bug
#700000. Remember
the bet?. It looks like the probability of Kartik Mistry winning
it is now away (he bet for Now 8th 2012) and the best position is hel
by David Prévot (he bet for December 12th). On the other hand, my own
chances are increasing if the bug rate drop is confirmed and if bug
#700000 is reported in more than 3 months (I bet for February 14th
2013, guess why?). We'll see that in a few weeks!